All posts tagged ‘adywan’

I’m trying hard to resist opening this post with the clichéd original Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope) version of once upon a time, but you all know what I mean. Anyway, back then a film was “finished,” then released, shown to audiences and that was that. With cinematic success and the rise of the home video market, certain directors saw fit to tinker with their creations before re-releasing them, adding a subtitle here, tweaking an edit there. Some of these changes make sense, while others certainly didn’t. From there, we move into the realms of the “Director’s Cut” – an auteur returning to his magnum opus and doing it his own way, perhaps after having changes forced upon him by the studio (see Blade Runner).

Then we have George Lucas.

When the Special Editions were first announced, the whole world was excited by the idea that we’d get to see our favorite films on the big screen again, and also to bring the experience to a new generation. Indeed the tagline for them was, “See it again, for the first time.” I was even a bit excited about what they’d do with all this newfangled CGI technology. What we weren’t expecting of course was for Mr. Lucas to tinker so much with the story, and in the process completely change one of the main characters. I refer to, of course, the fact that Han didn’t shoot first – he was the only one to shoot because the other guy was dead! There were so many silly decisions made across all three Special Editions and they’re well documented all over the web, so there’s no need to go into them here, but they still did well enough at the box office and paved the way for the prequel trilogy.